Citation

An S, Lim S, Kim HW, Kim HS, Lee D, Son E, Kim TW, Goh TS, Kim K, Kim YH. Asian J. Psychiatry 2023; 81: e103454.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ajp.2023.103454

PMID

36634498

Abstract

Suicide is a major problem in modern society. About 800,000 people kill themselves annually worldwide (Kim, 2021). In particular, with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, there is growing concern about the increased risk of suicide due to the aftereffects of COVID-19 infection (Tandon, 2021). Suicide and non-fatal self-harm cost nearly $490 billion in medical expenses, work-loss costs, and quality-of-life costs in 2019 (Peterson et al., 2021). As latitude increases, cumulative sunlight exposure decreases. Reduced sunlight exposure could increase mood disorders, such as depression, which may be considered a cause of suicide (Kim et al., 2021). Therefore, we aimed to analyze the global prevalence of suicide by latitude.

The detailed methodology of this study is presented in the Supplementary text. Twenty cross-sectional studies covering 40,694-74,652,466 participants published from 1982 to 2020 were used for analysis. A PRISMA flow diagram is shown in Supplementary Fig. 1. The characteristics and risk of bias assessment are summarized in Supplementary Tables 1 and 2, respectively. The overall weighted average suicide prevalence of this study was 13.34 (11.41-15.26) (Supplementary Fig. 2). The weighted average suicide prevalence was 8.12 (6.77-9.47) in the 0-14°, 8.54 (2.92-14.15) in the 15-29°, 9.97 (6.29-13.65) in the 30-44°, 19.23 (16.67-21.80) in the 45-59°, and 15.28 (9.12-21.44) in the 60-75°. As a result of the regression analysis, the beta coefficient was 0.255, which means that for every 1° increase, the suicide prevalence increased by 0.255 per 100,000 people (Fig. 1). The regression model with latitude change explained approximately 27.3% of the suicide prevalence (adjusted R-squared, 0.273)...

Language: en